My grandmother Nora and her twin Dora, age 83,
the long hot Texas summer of 1973, made for me
a patchwork quilt. Sorry, honey, we're not faster,
the needles slip out of our fingers the weather's
so humid, they wrote me in California where we
had drought, dust turned my peach tree gray, heat
dried up all the fruit but just in time for Christmas
the quilt arrived, a brilliant spread of cotton magic
I placed on my daughter's bed, later covered three
granddaughters for sleepovers and when the quilt
frayed, I stored it away in plastic. Nora and Dora
never let me pay for all their lovely, hard work,
told me scraps were free from their church folks
and last summer, long and hot like ones in Texas,
I remembered the quilt in the closet; across my bed
I tossed its bright wide skycloud sunrises and sunsets,
memory mosaic patches of Sunday-go-to-meeting or
Monday-go-to-school-or-work-or-coffee shop clothes,
stripes of blue, green, yellow, brown plaids from the
cowboy, farmer, truck driver, fix-it-man or teacher's
shirt, aqua paisley from Myrtle's apron or Michelle's
orange 8th grade skirt, red polka-dot sunbonnet, scarf,
green gingham kitchen curtain bits, black slashes off
back sleeves of Johnny Cash wannabes, tie-dye of the
town' s only hippie, all of them picnicking now upon
my bed where my great-grandson, age 2, sits in the
midst of them, eating a cookie, touches for a crumb
next to one of the 100s of threads Nora or Dora sewed
long ago time moment for some kin like him to find.